Back when the Hellfire Club was located at the site of the former Blackmarket Café in Chippendale, it appared in the movie The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving. In the particular scene, Keanu Reeves follows the white rabbit and meets Carrie-Anne Moss for the very first time at a dance club in this building.
Back
then, the Hellfire Club would host bondage nights where leather-clad patrons
equipped with whips, ropes and hot wax let their imagination run wild. In 1997,
several members of the Bandidos gang were gunned down in the basement by two
members of the Rebels bikie gang. It took two years to shut the place down. The
building has since become a café furniture showroom.
The
Hellfire Club, now relocated to Oxford Street, gets a mention in the article
below. There’s more information on the original club and its role in The Matrix in the fourth volume of Sydney on Screen: Where Heroes &
Monsters Play available for purchase here:
Annette Sharp in the mask she wore to The Hellfire
Club, Oxford Street, Sydney. Picture: Justin Lloyd Source: The Daily
Telegraph
Annette Sharp, The Daily Telegraph, reports
Perhaps I should have Googled The Hellfire Club's dress code before accepting a friend's invitation to visit the once notorious venue for his recently departed mother's send-off.
Knowing his exuberant tastes, it came as little surprise when, after serving as full-time carer to his beloved mum for the last decade of her life, he chose a non-traditional venue for her mourning party.
At 49 and single, he had earned it - so why not at The Hellfire Club? I had visited Sydney's premiere S&M venue just once before - some 17 years earlier while on a couples' night out proposed by an impossibly curious Bass Player I know.
Back then it was located at the Blackmarket Cafe in Chippendale - the memory of the foreboding site lingers to this day.
The entrance of the purple gothic-styled haunt was filled with dozens of menacing bikers. Inside, along with the bikers who would become synonymous with the place in 1997 when two Bandidos were shot dead, was a sweaty throng of Irish backpackers.
And in every other corner was a pasty-faced middle-aged man in a soiled polyester suit - travelling solo for cheap thrills.
On a torture rack centre stage was a woman in enormous white Bonds cottontail underpants, beige pantyhose and bra, being stung with a riding crop wielded by the venue's famed bondage master Tom - in leather chaps and mask.
I have been called naive many times in my life but the benchmark was set that night when I took the impish Bass Player's advice concerning Hellfire Club dress code.
Back then there was no way to Google the club which, like a sort of sordid Brigadoon, comes to life only one night a month ... at midnight.
So I took his "come in bondage gear" invitation as any Pollyanna-on-the-prowl might - enthusiastically. Encouraged by assurances his wife would be wearing "leather lace-up corset', I improvised hotpants, heels, stockings, strategically placed trouser-braces and leather jacket. I thought I'd done rather a decent job until we met that ruinous Bass Player and his wife in Chippendale and I found, to my abject and shirt-less horror, she was dressed in a floral Laura Ashley dress!
The rest of the night was spent fending off Master Tom's advances - my outfit oily burley to the dungeon master, who saw it as a sign I was rack-ready.
So last weekend, almost 20 years on, I was not going to make the same mistake - and pulled on skivvy and skirt under a large woollen overcoat.
These days the Hellfire Club has found a perfect home on Oxford St where the clientele are more high-minded, better groomed and most assiduously not packing.
The years have been good to Master Tom, aka Craig Donarski the promoter, now twice the man he once was. Although the modern dress code states "no effort, no entry" and rules the minimum dress code is a G-string, Satan's Bass Player, sensing an opportunity, arrived with leather masks for all to ensure admittance.
These days Hellfire is a bit like Disneyland for mums and dads at a fraction of the cost. There are large animal characters - a lifesize panda was at one point ravished by a stripper who ended her performance ripping off his head - fabulous fetish costumes, pool tables, nude body-painting and, of course, the rack - which these days is used by chubby couples who spank each other and make up before spanking each other all over again.
After the Bass Player's wife and I observed such a demonstration (played to Cold Chisel's Breakfast At Sweethearts), I made a visit to the ladies room where a young woman, shocked by what I was wearing, implored me to shed.
"I have to take it all off!" she entreated.
Grateful I had taken my mother's childhood advice and was wearing my trusty cold-weather singlet, I obliged, swapping skivvy for singie.
My husband by this time was chatting with the dungeon master. Concerned he was about to be evicted for failing to wear a loincloth, I joined them and was stunned to find he and Master Tom were having a reunion - they were once kindergarten pals at Fairy Meadow Demonstration School on the South Coast. RIP Mrs A.
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